Business | Technology

Dell to target Middle East SMEs

Dell’s offices in Internet City, Dubai. Dell has hired a number of senior executives for the
enterprise business in the past year.

Dubai: Dell Inc., the US-based PC manufacturer, aims to grow its enterprise division in the Middle East to account for 40 per cent of regional revenues within a couple of years as it implements a global strategy to diversify away from selling purely computers and laptops, a senior executive said.

Currently, Dell makes one-third of revenues in the Middle East from its enterprise business that sells hardware, software and services to companies, Aongus Hegarty, Dell’s vice president and general manager of the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, told Zawya Dow Jones in a recent interview.

But Dell aims to further increase its enterprise business as a share of overall revenues and compete with more traditional IT players such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Servicing small and medium-sized businesses would be a focus for Dell in the region next year.

“We have very much been transforming,” said Hegarty, who expects enterprise revenues to make up 40 per cent of Middle East sales, as well as global revenues, within two to three years.

“A lot of people say Dell is the PC company and that is our history and our legacy developed out of the desktop and notebook business, but over a number of years now we have been developing our business from a technology and enterprise solutions perspective.”

Dell has hired a number of senior executives for the enterprise business in the past year, including Marius Haas, the former head of Hewlett-Packard’s networking business. The company also named Suresh Vaswani as president of Dell Services last week after the sudden resignation of Steve Schuckenbrock, who left to “seek new opportunities.”

Dell has also made a number of acquisitions in the enterprise space this year, including Sonicwall, a network security company, Quest Software, a software manufacturer and Wyse, a cloud computing firm.

“More than 50 per cent of our global profitability now comes from enterprise solutions, which is the server storage, networking, services and software,” said Hegarty. “In the enterprise solutions aspect of our business, we have more of the intellectual property and the margin associated with that is higher.”

Dell last month reported an 11 per cent decrease in global revenues to $13.7 billion in the three months to November 2 as sales from desktop PCs fell.

Operating income for the third quarter was $589 million and earnings per share was 27 cents, down 45 per cent from the same period last year.